Elouise Cobell


“I tried to do the right thing,” she said, “the way that you believe government should work. I really tried to follow the entire process; I went to the adminis- tration, I told them the stories, I told them what was happening. But through the years they told many people, ‘Just sue us.’ And, so, we just sued them.”


the Native American Bank. As the treasurer, she discovered that the numbers on the books just didn’t add up. Oil was being taken off the reservation but oil money was seldom com- ing in. She quickly learned that no accounts- receivable system was in place, so she started attending government meetings and asking questions. They told her she didn’t know how to read an account statement. And that’s when she started calling senators and congressmen and anyone who would or wouldn’t listen. She banded together with a group of tribal finance officers from Red Lake, Jicarilla Apache, Turtle Mountain and White Mountain Apache res- ervations and David J. Matheson (Coeur d’Alene), Deputy Comissioner of Indian Af- fairs under the George H.W. Bush administra- tion. Together, they started to get the attention of Congress. In 1994 Congress passed the Indian Trust


Reform Act and the Department of Interior appointed a Special Trustee to help remedy the problems in both the Tribal and IIM (In- dividual Indian Monies) Accounts. Two years later, however, nothing had changed. A chance encounter with Attorney General Janet Reno, however, changed everything.


30 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2013 Cobell met the Attorney General at an


Indian banking conference where they were both speakers. She told Reno about the prob- lems with the Trust Fund, and Reno asked her to write a letter requesting a meeting. Several months later, after calling Reno’s office every week, Cobell finally got her meeting. In D.C. she was greeted by lawyers from the depart- ments of Interior, Justice and Treasury, but no Attorney General. “Now Elouise,” one at- torney told her, “don’t you come in here with any false expectations,” she recalled. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,”


Cobell replied. “You have got to understand that every day Indian people are dying in Indian communities without the money that they need for the basics of life, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” It was the straw that broke the camel’s back! “I tried to do the right thing,” she said,


“the way that you believe government should work. I really tried to follow the entire process; I went to the administration, I told them the stories, I told them what was happening. But through the years they told many people, ‘Just sue us.’ And, so, we just sued them.” On June 10, 1996, Cobell, along with the


Native American Rights Fund and lead attor- ney Dennis Gingold filed a class-action lawsuit against the United States Department of Interi- or for the mismanagement of the Indian Trust Funds belonging to over 300,000 individual tribal members, the largest class-action lawsuit ever filed against the United States government. When Cobell filed the lawsuit, she ex-


pected it to take about three years. Instead, it languished in the courts for 15 long years. On one of her many flights to D.C. she was asked by a fellow passenger what she did for a living. “I knew from experience that if I told him I was a banker he would just nod his head and stare out the window. So I told him I was reforming the U.S. government,” she recalled. “His response was, ‘Say what?’ But that was a good way for me to get people talking about this lawsuit.” For 10 of those 15 years in the court, the


presiding judge was Federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a Republican from Texas, appoint- ed by President Reagan. Judge Lamberth is known for his “take no


bull” attitude. During the case he held two Secretaries of Interior in contempt of court: Bruce Babbitt (Clinton Administration) for


PHOTO COURTESY OF FIRE IN THE BELLY PRODUCTIONS


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